ISCA Archive Interspeech 2004
ISCA Archive Interspeech 2004

Throat microphone signal for speaker recognition

Bayya Yegnanarayana, A. Shahina, M. R. Kesheorey

Speaker recognition systems perform better when clean speech signals are used for the task. In the presence of high levels of background noise, speech recorded from a close speaking microphone will be degraded and hence the performance of the speaker recognition system. Use of a transducer held at the throat results in a signal that is clean even in a noisy environment. This paper discusses the prospect of using such signals for speaker recognition. A study of a text-independent speaker recognition system based on features extracted from speech simultaneously recorded using a throat microphone and a close-speaking microphone in clean and simulated noisy conditions is conducted. Autoassociative neural networks are used to model the speaker characteristics based on the vocal tract system and excitation source features represented by weighted linear prediction cepstral coefficients and linear prediction residual, respectively. The results of experimental studies show that the speech collected from the throat microphone can be used for tasks like speaker recognition, especially in noisy conditions.